Michael Kriesel

...Poem Peace Time Military When I first came in the Navy guys who'd been in for a while kept telling me how the bullshit keeps getting deeper in peace time when I joined in 1980 no one cared if you were fat as long as you did your job but pretty soon they started PT testing you had to run a mile & a half in thirteen minutes later on you had to be a certain body fat percentage or they'd kick you out especially guys who were close to retiring like my boss & drinking buddy Fred Miles Watson he only had a year to go and the whole time the Navy did nothing but fuck with him they even held up his promotion though he walked on water every day at work where he wasn't too fat to give tours of the base to Congressmen or Miss America and the Navy never cared how fat he was on that patrol boat watching tracers cross the river every night in Vietnam -Michael Kriesel Michael Kriesel lives in central Wisconsin and is the winner of the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers...

...From 1980 to 1990, he was a newspaper editor and broadcast journalist in the U.S...